I’m a huge proponent of containerized development, so I use docker for just about everything.
As a result, in order to build python applications I only have two language-specific programs installed on my machine.
In this post I will show you how to set up a bare bones local environment for python development.
Although your computer probably has a system python installation, this is typically an older version such as 2.7 or 3.4.
We want the cutting edge stuff, so head over to the python site and grab the most recent stable version. At the time I’m writing this, the most recent version is 3.7.4.
Once you have python installed, all we need to do is install pipenv. You can do this by running:
$ pip install --user pipenvpipenv is a package manager that lives on top of regular pip, python’s default package manager. It provides quite a few really valuable features including deterministic package installations. If you want to read more about it, I highly recommend their docs.
Although we could technically use pipenv from within our docker containers, you lose the benefits of the pip cache. As a result, installations can take significantly longer.
These two programs combined with docker and docker-compose are all you need to get started building python applications.
Happy coding!